The Politics of Working Life and Meaningful Waged Work

Préface
A new theory exploring what makes modern waged work either meaningful or meaningless.

Auteur
Knut Laaser is a Senior Researcher at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus Senftenberg and a Lecturer at the University of Stirling. He has published on the moral economy of work and employment and more recently on meaningful work in international and world-leading journals. Jan Ch. Karlsson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Department of Working Life Science, Karlstad University, Sweden. He is the author of Organizational Misbehaviour in the Workplace: Narratives of Dignity and Resistance (2012), Collective Mobilization in Changing Conditions: Worker Collectivity in a Turbulent Age (2019) and Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences (2019).

Texte du rabat
What makes waged work meaningful and what makes it meaningless? Promoting a political understanding of waged work, the authors develop a novel theory that presents different scenarios of meaningful-meaningless work, illustrated with the help of workplace case studies from Norway, Britain, India, Germany and Sweden.

Résumé
Can waged work under capitalism be meaningful? How does this meaningfulness express itself in the politics of working life? More fundamentally, how should work be socially and economically valued, rewarded, organised and regulated to become more meaningful? Knut Laaser and Jan Ch. Karlsson address these questions and provide a novel theory of meaningful work that is deeply ingrained in Critical Social Science approaches. The authors conceptualise meaningful work as a continuum between meaningfulmeaningless work that rests on objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, dignity and recognition, all pushed and pulled by the multi-layered control and power dynamics of waged work. They challenge the tendency to promote unpolitical concepts in the scholarship of meaningful work. The explanatory power of the meaningful work framework is illustrated by the analysis of empirical case studies on Norwegian industry operators, British bank employees, Indian security guards, German university academics and Swedish cabin crew members.

Contenu

Preface; 1. Meaningful work; Part I. Problems in Analyses of Meaningful Work: 2. Contradictions in the concept of work; 3. The ideological meaning of exploitative work forms; 4. The politics of working life; Part II. Theoretical Traditions in Analysing Meaningful Waged Work: 5. Approaching the meaning of waged work through its meaninglessness; 6. Designing, organising and managing meaningful waged work; 7. Meaningful wage labour as a human condition: humanist accounts of meaningful waged work; 8. The political philosophy of meaningful wage labour; Part III. Meaningful and Meaningless Waged Work: 9. Objective and subjective dimensions of meaningful waged work: towards a new meaningful work framework; 10. Theorizing meaningful and meaningless waged work; 11. Conclusion: meaningful waged work and its implications for the critical analysis of work and employment; References; Index.